If you’re getting your feet wet in publishing with your first book (which I highly recommend doing), you’re not expected to have loads of other products to sell to your readers. While I do recommend you start using the information in a previous article, Part 1: How to Make Money Off Every Book Sale (with Your Own Back-End Products) to brainstorm ideas for your own additional products, you can still make money off other people’s products that already exist.
Advertise Your Colleagues
Now it’s time to do some research. Find a colleague in your industry who has a training program or digital course that nicely compliments the material in your book. Find out if they have an affiliate program and sign up for it. If they don’t have an affiliate program, contact them to see if you can work out some sort of joint-venture partnership where you can have a special page with their product or a coupon code so you can get a commission for any of your readers who click through and buy it.
Then, using your own domain name redirect and a high resolution graphic image of the product (supplied by your colleague), write a few bullet points (these can also be supplied by your colleague) that showcase the benefits of this product and why your reader should invest in it.
Include a call to action with your link along the bottom of the page as well as embedding your link in some text at the top of the page (e-books only). If they’re reading your book on an e-reader, this will ensure they can get to the product even if they don’t see the link at the bottom, as every e-reader’s font size can be configured by the user so there’s no guarantee your “page” will be intact on one screen.
Now you have a product you recommend for which you don’t have to handle any creation, setup, or customer service—and you can start making passive commission.
(Note: Click here to sign up as an affiliate for The Book Ninja and promote our products!)
Private Label Rights
Private label rights (PLR) materials are essentially templates, documents, reports, articles, and anything else you can think of that people create and sell with the sole purpose of it being re-sold in some way shape or form. You can use PLR material as a foundation to create your own product, and you can also purchase many and sell them as templates to your readers in one bundle.
There are PLR sites that sell material for pretty much any niche. There are also some newer template-selling websites that make it easy to put together a unique product package. Many of my clients are coaches (business, life, health, finance, real estate, transition, etc.) and if you’re a coach, look at CoachGlue, run by my fellow The Future of Ink contributor Nicole Dean for an example of what I’m talking about. If you’re in a different industry and you want to explore this product creation option further, Google “PLR your niche” and see what comes up.
The most important thing to remember when using PLR as a source of content is make it your own. Many PLR sites sell content to thousands of others—not just you. You want to make sure the product you put together is unique.
Fiction Products
If your book is a work of fiction, you may feel selling someone’s product at the back of your book doesn’t apply. This couldn’t be further from the truth! Think back to when you first got started in writing. Were you inspired by another writer? How many times after your first blog post, article, poem, or short story was published did someone ask you about how you got started? If you’ve already published your book, how many times has someone asked you how you wrote and published it?
Writing courses are hugely popular. Most people say they have a story inside them, or they want to write a book. If you’re writing fiction, find someone else’s writing course and advertise it in the back of your book with your affiliate link. You will be surprised how many people will click through and buy a course after they read your book, because they want to do what you’ve done—be an author!
Start doing research. Use these ideas as a launching point to find someone else’s product, course, template, or other service to partner with as an advertiser in the back of your book. Then watch as your passive income rises when those commissions start to roll in!
What tips and strategies have worked for you? Share in the comments below!
Note: This article is adapted from the chapter, Their Products in Kristen’s Kindle book, Author’s Quick Guide to Making Money with Your 99-Cent Kindle Book.
